Bjork - Volta
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CD Details
Artist: BjorkBrand: BJORK
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-05-08
Music Label: Atlantic
Product features:
- U.S. issue
- Rock
- 2007 release
- Earth Intruders
- Wanderlust
- The Dull Flame Of Desire
- Innocence
- I See Who You Are
- Vertebrae By Vertebrae
- Pneumonia
- Hope
- Declare Independence
- My Juvenile
Music reviews of Volta
Music Review: No new ideas, and very little music.
Rating: 2 Stars
The lyrics to "The Dull Flame Of Desire," the third song on Bjork's latest album, were originally written by the 19th-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Unintentionally, this song reveals everything that's wrong with Bjork as an artist -- she got the idea to adapt Tyutchev, not from any interest in Russian poetry, but from watching Andrei Tarkovsky's art-house film "Stalker," where the poem is quoted. In other words, her affectations of high art are filtered through the dilettantism of a college undergraduate. She comes across a quote from Tyutchev in a critically approved, famously ponderous film by a critically approved, famously intellectual director, and that's it, she thinks she understands Tyutchev enough to interpret him.
Like every undergraduate dilettante, Bjork mixes her affectations of high art with annoying cutesiness, vulgarity, cheap pathos, platitudes, and other forms of bad writing and bad taste. That's deep, you see -- you can put high art next to low art, which is original and ironic, but it's also deep because it shows that like, low art is the same as high art and stuff. Thus Tyutchev's poem is preceded by "Earth Intruders," which is about space invaders and features such lyrics as "Metallic carnage! Ferocity! Feel the speed!" and followed by "Innocence," which consists of one really harsh, clanging beat and not much else.
The phrase "not much else" can really be applied to every song on the album. The reviewer who cited the "nothingness" of the album hit it dead-on. Bjork has always had this problem -- her songs often made the impression of music without actually having a lot of memorable music. But here there's not even much of an impression. In "The Dull Flame Of Desire," the strings just sort of sit in the background, playing very basic notes, and often sounding just like some ambient background noise. Bjork's moving tale of "Wanderlust" starts with some grand-sounding horns, but they are shortly relegated to blowing very simple notes in the background. And these two songs together take up fifteen minutes. "My Juvenile" is one of the better songs on the album, and there too the music consists of solitary piano notes in between Bjork's lines. There are no musical leads, no melodies, no development, no real rhythms even. The music consists of the most basic textures.
Granted, most of these textures are listenable, but all of them are immediately forgettable. And she's already done this stuff before -- the harsh sound in "Earth Intruders" recalls "Army Of Me," the delicate harps in "I See Who You Are" recall "Cover Me," the wacky cover art recalls the cover of Post, and so on. I guess if Medulla was kind of like Homogenic II, a serious album about nature and emotions, then Volta is more like Post II, an attempt to make a more quirky and fun album with diverse instrumentation. But the returns are diminishing fast.
Aside from "Earth Intruders," which is the most fully realized song on the album, none of the songs has any kind of vocal hook. Bjork's lyrics have no rhythm, no rhyme, no meter. She doesn't even bother to fit them into the beat anymore, where there even is a beat. And even when the lyrics are given to her with a very strict, formal meter (the Tyutchev poem), she pays little attention to that structure, and draws out the words, one syllable at a time, in exactly the same way in every song. The entire midsection of the album sounds very self-similar, because her delivery in "The Dull Flame Of Desire," "I See Who You Are," "Vertebrae By Vertebrae," and "Pneumonia" is more or less the same, and it's also the same as her delivery in her earlier slow songs like "All Neon Like." She's been doing this ever since Homogenic, if not since Debut, but now her music is so basic that there's just nothing to catch hold of.
Most of her writing is empty of content, and it's at its emptiest when she actually tries to make a statement about something. Take a look at "Hope." Bjork has apparently been hanging out with MIA a little too much, and this has led her to write a song about suicide bombers. Her analysis: "What's the lesser of two evils? If a suicide bomber made to look pregnant manages to kill her target or not?.. If she kills them or dies in vain?" And then, having posed this question, she coyly fails to provide any relevant answer, aside from a thoroughly meaningless platitude about how "nature has fixed no limits on our hopes"! Get it? She's leaving the answer open to you, the listener! Oh man, it's so thought-provoking to take the absolute easiest possible way out of a moral question.
But never fear, she recoups with "Declare Independence." Now, instead of dodging her own questions, she urges you to action: "Declare independence! Don't let them do that to you! Protect your language! Make your own flag!" Very strange, coming from a cosmopolitan pop star. I take it we'll be seeing her at the next convention of the Scottish National Party? It can't be that she's just saying that without any conviction, can it?
Bjork is famous as an artist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the best things about her were her pop and dance inclinations. Debut isn't a musical masterpiece any more than Volta is, but it does have danceable beats, fun pop choruses, and an infectious sense of youthful energy, all of which are missing from Volta. Post suffers from many of the same problems as Volta, but it has a sensual production and a few strong pop hooks. Homogenic has fine singles. Volta has absolutely nothing that makes it stand out, other than being Bjork's worst album to date.
Description of Volta
Bjork returns to her iconic, innovative and rhythmic roots with Volta. Featuring her own infamous beats and collaborations with Timbaland, Antony Hegarty, Brian Chippendale and an all-female Icelandic brass section, the end result is an explosion of beats and an amalgamtion of sound and visuals that give Volta a life of its own, like the world hasn't seen from Bjork in years.Björk's main asset as a musician is her fearlessness. Since the end of The Sugarcubes and the pop-dance of Debut, she has released progressively more experimental records. But after well over a decade of going further and further out, Volta steps back. Make no mistake; this is Björk, and so it's still fabulously weird. Like 2004's mesmerizing Medúlla and the 2005 soundtrack for Drawing Restraint 9, the songs are blissfully peculiar, with narratives about love, offspring, aliens...you name it. Yet melodically and philosophically, Volta recycles more than it innovates; the driving pulse of "Declare Independence," for instance, reminds us of Homogenic's "Pluto," and the lead single "Earth Intruders" sounds like Post's "Army of Me" on steroids. And just as Medúlla oriented itself around a certain instrument--the human voice--this one concentrates on horns.
Still, the transition between her early work and the avant-garde bender she's been on since Vespertine is pretty harrowing, and it's satisfying to hear Björk revisit her more accessible self. Uber-producer Timbaland pitches in here and there, most successfully on "Innocence," which uses a fat, disjointed pulse to drive the euphoric vocals forward. Elsewhere, the hyperactive sitar sample on "I See Who You Are" provides texture for the song's theme of enjoying each other while there's still "flesh on our bones." And "Pneumonia" makes fantastic use of the horn section with a soft arrangement that compliments the song's lyrical melody.
So while it's a bit of a stall, Volta is a lovely pause. It reminds us how much we appreciate the laboratory of Björk?s imagination, but also how much we missed her back when she was just goofing around. ?Matthew Cooke
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